We enjoyed the first episode up until it ended with no warning. Current plan is to wait until the season is over, sign up for a one week free trial, and binge them all at once. If enough other people do that, hopefully CBS will come to thier senses.

So you'll be waiting until next summer then? They are splitting the season in half so the final episode won't "air" until next spring. Probably their plan to try and trick people into using up their free trial after the first half season airs.

Didn't know about that part, but oh well. I'll probably use the trial during the hiatus and maybe pay the $6 for one month after it's over if I liked the first half enough. In any case I won't be keeping the service for any longer than I need to watch the one show I care about on it.

There really has been an explosion of online streaming of exclusive original content in the past few years. Netflix was the pioneer, followed closely by Hulu. Then Amazon got into the mix. Yahoo tried it out with Yahoo Screen, which didn't work out. AT&T has the Audience Network, although since that's also available to DirectTV/AT&T Uverse subscribers I guess that's not QUITE the same thing. I just know I can only watch Mr Mercedes through an online streaming service because I'm a Comcast customer. And now CBS, a company that's been broadcasting for 90 years, has their online service.

I can't help but draw comparisons to the video game crash in the early 80s. Yahoo tried to use Community to draw people into their service, and now CBS is trying to use Star Trek to draw people in. It's like when Atari made that terrible Pac Man game, and created more copies than the total number of owned consoles, with the hope that the game would drive more people to buy Ataris. Maybe all this expansion of streaming will finally pop and we'll get this down to some manageable number of sites so people don't need so many damned subscriptions.

Also, what's up with those Klingons? They look like humans wearing leather masks. Why did the creators feel this odd need to reinvent the wheel? Do the Vulcans still have pointy ears?

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I'm not particularly religious, and I don't really like Muppets, but I do love word play.

This article suggests CBS doesn't care if they lose money on Discovery, they don't really care about their streaming service either, it's all about using it as a bargaining chip to get more out of cable companies when negotiating re-transmission fees:

The Discovery pilot was okay but I'm definitely not going to pay for the CBS app just to watch the rest of the season. I'll probably wait until it's on Blu-Ray or it eventually airs on cable.

Some things about the pilot that I didn't like was the bickering that was going on between the crew members. To me that didn't feel like something Roddenberry would have done but maybe it was and I'm mis-remembering. I guess it could be argued some of the later series had similar conflicts on the bridge though.

While I was really excited to see Doug Jones play one of the main characters in full makeup I thought Saru may be the most useless science officer in Star Fleet that we've seen. Granted we've seen very little of the character but my first impression was not good. I did like the design of the character though.

I know they've said this isn't part of the Abramsverse but it definitely looks the part.

I am interesting in seeing Rainn Wilson play a younger Harry Mudd though.

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"It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It ensures his existence." -- James Douglas Morrison

FYI- when I tried to cancel the account earlier today, CBS offered me a free month of the service, so you may be able to catch a half dozen or so episodes, including the pilot's two episodes, without paying.

Me? Unimpressed, although the second episode was better than the first. Don't like the changes to the Klingons, either in make up or in lore. (Prior to this, the Romulans disappeared for 100 years after their war with the Federation (from the original series) while the remainder of the lore indicated that the Klingons had always been around. For a no-longer canon example, the novel The Final Reflection, which was taken as close to canon for a while leading up to STNG, had the Klingons on Earth for a peace conference interacting with a 10 year old Spock and McCoy's dad. There are similar examples in other Trek sources.) The color scheme for the ships was wrong (No, brown and blue are not Starfleet colors. And buy some damn light bulbs.) Human's don't have the strength to do the Vulcan nerve pinch. (Yes, they ignored that in Enterprise. They ignored a lot in Enterprise.) No, they didn't have holograms back then. And Michael was veering close to being a less reasonable character than Marrissa Picard for a good chunk of that pilot. Maybe it'll get better in the "real" first episode when they're actually on the Discovery, but so far, well, Seth's writing better Star Trek than Star Trek is.

The fact that they want the audience to believe that the entire crew of the Discovery, who have just returned from the Mirror Universe where they played the old 'oh, actually, they aren't dead, they were just missing' trick, don't suspect that this Georgiou is the Mirror Universe one - especially given how she acts on the bridge - is just mind boggling.

I actually ended up liking it quite a bit more than I thought I would. My biggest complaint is that they seem to have ditched the ensemble cast structure that every other Star Trek series has used, and instead only focus on a handful of characters.

In addition to what Edward J Grug said, we're supposed to believe the Klingons are okay with there being a planet destroying explosive just sitting at their homeworld's core? So is it still there throughout all the succeeding series? Is the detonator locked in a vault somewhere with a "Do Not Touch - Will Destroy Cronos" sign on it?

In addition to what Edward J Grug said, we're supposed to believe the Klingons are okay with there being a planet destroying explosive just sitting at their homeworld's core? So is it still there throughout all the succeeding series? Is the detonator locked in a vault somewhere with a "Do Not Touch - Will Destroy Cronos" sign on it?

In addition to what Edward J Grug said, we're supposed to believe the Klingons are okay with there being a planet destroying explosive just sitting at their homeworld's core? So is it still there throughout all the succeeding series? Is the detonator locked in a vault somewhere with a "Do Not Touch - Will Destroy Cronos" sign on it?

Starfleet gave them a Mr. Yuck sticker to put on it.

Reminds me of the Mission Log podcast, talking about leaving the orange cones around Talos IV.